Back when your grandma was young and hot, she probably put on her best push-up bra and starred in trashy B-movies like She Freak. A fun freaky movie from the “Something Weird” catalog.
A carnival comes to town, in what I assume to be some crappy dusty California tiny desert town. Jade is a waitress in a greasy spoon in this shitty town, everyone is trying to fuck her and she needs nothing to do with them. Then a carnival advance man comes in, asks to put up a poster, calls her sweetie and honey and darling a lot, eats some pie and offers her a carnival job. Yay! She hates her life and needs an escape. The advance man assures her the job and the lifestyle is crappy, and she’s better off staying in her marginally-less-crappy job. Her diner boss calls her a whore and fires her, so she joins the carnival because it can’t possibly be worse than working in this shitty diner. For this shitty boss. So away to the circus she runs, and gets a slick new job… waiting tables.
Jade makes friends with a burlesque dancer and admires her super glamorous $20/week motel room, but hates the freaks with a searing passion. The freaks are terribly exotic and a little frightening indeed! There’s a sword swallower, a guy who does parlor tricks, and a lady who owns a snake. That’s about it. A whole menagerie of ’em! A whole freaky menagerie!
She’s asking, on her first week, which guys are available and have money so that she can marry them and get the lower middle-class lifestyle every trailer park girl dreams of, and who lands in her sights? The guy who runs the freakshow! Oh noes! Not the FrEaK sHoW!!! Still, he DOES have a swell lightly-used car and a small place in Tampa. Tampa FLORIDA! Not just some imitation Tampa, it’s the real ONE! So yessir, Jade’s gonna marry herself into that lower middle-class Tampa lifestyle. It’s just a shame that these freaks are involved, but at least she’ll have access to those sweet sweet freak dollars!
Shortly after she hooks up with freak daddy she has a fling with one of the ride operators. No way freak daddy will ever find out… but oh noes! He has a spy in the form of a little person in a ten-gallon hat! (I’m going to avoid the obvious joke opening here, because I’m classier than that) She continues on with her (it’s a pint and a half hat!) freak daddy, and they have many fun-filled dates around work… eating cotton candy and riding the rides and trying on novelty hats and stuff, because why leave work to have your romance? It must have worked, because they eventually get married, and she moves into his motel room, where they return from a fun-filled sad depressing carny day to count his four stacks of 5’s, 10’s and a few 20’s. That looked like at LEAST $200!! Slick, Jade, YOU certainly married UP! Before you know it you’ll be First Lady in the White House!
Still, she can’t resist getting some carny strange! Back to the ride guy’s luxury flatbed accommodations, and Shorty (that’s his name, I’m not being un-woke, mind your business!) is hot on their heels! He spies on the boss’s wife getting her groove on with the ferris wheel jockey, and he tattles! He tattles and she gets her comeuppance!
Trashy horror sexploitation movie, filmed for around $75,000 on location at the Kern County Fair in California, with plenty of footage of carny life and genuine real-live pretend not at all real carny freaks. It’s a direct rip-off of the 1932 “Freaks” movie but with swanky surf guitar music and much less “awesome.” It’s trashy, the acting is dreadful, the writing is amateurish and the movie is a slow predictable slog. It’s a late-60’s exploitation cult film shown mostly at drive-ins and grindhouse theaters, so She Freak delivers the expected experience. Lower your expectations and enjoy the sleaze!
The majority of the footage is basically shot around a working carnival as it undertakes its normal operations, many of these scenes include an assortment of carny-goers walking and looking directly at the camera, wondering “What’s all THIS about?” So the pace is slow, a lot of scene padding as they just set up a camera at a carnival and take pictures of what they see and, occasionally, put a couple of terrible actors into the middle of it all.
It’s a horror movie without horror. A sexploitation movie without sex. It’s like a Reeses Peanut Butter Cup if they were made out of driveway gravel and boring. Smoke a whole something and the movie will be fine.